


it is silver, it is a coin (that one is the moon)

by fypical



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Coda, Dream Sequence, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-01
Updated: 2015-06-01
Packaged: 2018-04-02 07:03:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4050709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fypical/pseuds/fypical
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What is a ghost? Something dead that seems to be alive. (When Remus dreams, the veil waits; it feels like home.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	it is silver, it is a coin (that one is the moon)

#### "All this was prepared for me. All this was set in  
motion long ago. I live in someone else’s future.   
_I stayed as long as I could_ , he said. _Now look at the moon._ "

(Richard Siken,  _The Worm King's Lullaby 5 -_ War of the Foxes)

* * *

 

Sirius falls.

 

Arcs, like a ballet, like a parabola, a graceful backbend into oblivion, like he’s being dipped at the end of a salsa dance, like he’s falling off a broom. The veil flies, as though a breath crosses it, gentle and soft, like a piece of silk or a butterfly wing, full of holes and nearly invisible. And then—the screaming does not belong to him, but it should. It should be coming from him, pulled from the chest that cannot open once closed, ripped through a too-tight throat – not from a child, a boy too-close and too-far all at once.

 

_He can’t come back, because he’s dead._

 

The words come wrong, from someplace other than him, his own voice in his ears gone hoarse and foreign.  The moon should be full, for the way he feels a mile above himself, incorporeal in his own skin, but the moon is at a quarter and his limbs don’t work.

 

The veil whispers, has voices like ghosts, blurred and undefined – at an angle it could be anyone, James or Lily or Lyall or Hope (or Sirius, hovered near the gateway, like a fog).

 

The veil waves, its holes and folds shifting, becomes a mirror – shows scars, dark-circled eyes, tracks of tears-to-be like ditches down cheeks. Maybe the veil knows the future. Maybe it’s wishful thinking.

 

There is screaming, in the distance, shouts and spells, and he is stuck, looking at a face not quite his own, from the wrong angle, the wrong light.

 

The moon is waning gibbous. Remus wakes, trips over a box of books from the bedroom to the shower. Winces at stinging cuts, aching bruises – feels like a child again, pulled apart and shoved together unceremonious. The cottage is silent, echoingly empty but for the creaks of the floors and the creaks of his bones. Solitude is easiest, he lets it sit heavy and uncomfortable around him – but better than pity, sadness-downturned mouths and eyes obscured by frowns. (Better than unwanted attention.)

 

It’s raining – it’s England, shouldn’t be a surprise, but the rush of water against ground, slippery grass and wet gravel beat down by morning torrent catches him, has him watching, reflection distorted by the soaked, streaked window. Tea is not yet warming, too early for something stronger.

 

He is struck by the sudden urge to break something – a cup, a window, his hand. The paint on the walls is cracked, peeling from the damp. Remus sympathizes – feels broken at the seams, come-apart when too closely looked at. (It’s only him who looks too close, catches the seams come loose.)

 

“Loss,” he’s been told, “cannot be prepared for, no matter how experienced with it one might feel.”

 

There is a gouge, in the table, from his fingers – anger or grief or resentment, or something in between. What anyone else might know about loss means nothing to him, who wishes he did not care, was as separate from the world as the cottage feels – but there is something in his chest, trapped still in the closed-off cavity that will not leave him peaceful.

 

The garden has ghosts, even if the house is empty, the dead residing in the vegetables and flowers, the disappeared in the weeds, and Remus among them the only living being that does not have roots. He does not tend the garden – tries a spell, watches the grass, wet beneath his bare feet, go brown.

 

 _Will you come with me?_ he asks at night, searching the faces in the veil. Solitude is easier, but it hangs like a sword above his neck – being alone is only good for so long, and the living no longer interest him. The veil shifts, Sirius turns from face to body, nearly transparent but touches his face, traces a scar. His smile is twisted, the angle gone wrong – Remus kisses the corner of it, desperate and quick, pulls back to find a void, a vacancy.  The veil shifts, Sirius’s hand on his neck with it. _No._ His breath pushes the veil back; Sirius vanishes, lost in a tear of the fabric. ( _You are alone._ )

 

Remus has been at war for most of his life, has fought. Knows how to cut through horror, keep moving, but his feet are flued to the creaky cracking floor and his limbs are weighted down by drenched clothes. The veil shifts again, a child appears before him, all bones and discomfort, like two mirrors held against each other a row of selves he’s killed (human, adolescent, professor). A ghost of himself, old and dark-eyed, like the dead themselves, fogs and blurs in the back – projection, or a prophecy. It is the place for them, after all, destroyed and lost they might be – he belongs among the fog of futures disappeared, perhaps.

 

The battle is two years too late, feels like pulling a splinter from a wound, and that he is old does not matter, that he has been dead for two years does not matter – the castle is more home than the cottage, than the old mansion in London, than the swingset by his parents’ house.

 

The green light at the centre of his chest feels like a relief, like catharsis or freedom, the bend of his body at the edge of his consciousness like a ballet, like a parabola.

 

 _Your son_ , says the boy, still a child and shaped by loss but not alone, and Remus thinks – there was little left for him, a child should have a parent not already a walking corpse.

 

The ring falls. His eyes close. _Enough._

 

The veil is still, whole and holy and no longer waiting.

**Author's Note:**

> This literally came from me getting emotional about Richard Siken's full-circle response style of the end of The Worm King's Lullaby in which he quotes lines from Anyway (which has always made me cry about Remus and Remus/Sirius). 
> 
> This is the first Remus/Sirius (or Harry Potter) fic I've written since I was fourteen years old. Credit to Siken for the quotes and the pain (and JKR too, I guess). Thanks to Kate, Sarah, Cait, and James for yelling about poetry and Harry Potter with me.


End file.
